I love the mint menu but I seem to be suffering some major performance problems with it. Whenever I add/install programs it will freeze and not open for like 5 minutes, and it seems to leak memory really bad (Just found it using like 300 mb of memory. Are there any workarounds or anything to improve it's performance?

The problem you're describing with mintmenu is normal. Mintmenu is in reality a fork(?) of USP menu developed as a third party project for Ubuntu. It's designed as a much more flexible, attractive alternative to SUSE's SLAB menu introduced with SLED 10. But, I digress. The pause following new program installation occurs when mintmenu updates itself to show the new software you've installed. As for your memory leak issues, I don't seem to have that problem with my installation. I'm using Mint 3.1 with Daryna's packages for mintmenu, mintupdate, mintdesktop...etc. If you're not using Daryna, then perhaps you should update to that version of Mint's applets and see if that helps improve your mintmenu experience. To grab the latest versions of the "mintiness" go to: http://www.linuxmint.com/repository/daryna/

Unfortunately mintMenu is a bit hungry for memory. However if you find it is using that amount of memory I believe something "not normal" is going onIt is unfortunately common with a lock up as you describe it, but about 5 seconds and then OK.I think these events are connected. Mintmenu is not a separate item in the system monitor (at least I never see it) but you rather have to look at Python which in my computer normally is around 14 MBThis is no help of course, but a background. Have you done any modifications to mintMenu - added favorites, rearranged the way it looks, anything?The truth is we don't really understand why this happens in a relatively small number of cases, but many enough to be a real problem.There will be a new version of mintMenu as soon as the dev for it has finished it

I am using Darnya, I haven't made any modifications besides changing the firefox icon. I guess I am going to use SLAB for now, I just wish tracker would integtrate with it like bealge does in suse. Not using mint menu seems to have halved my login time also.